but a little won't fly
by cupid-painted-blind
Summary: It should be beautiful, but her definition of beauty has changed. Zuko/Katara; half romance, half memory. Winner of the Zutarotica 2012 Winter Challenge.


**Title**: but a little won't fly  
><strong>Author<strong>: andromeda3116  
><strong>Rating<strong>: G/PG, depending how you want to interpret some implication.  
><strong>Genre<strong>: Angst-heavy, half-romance.  
><strong>CharactersPairings**: Zuko/Katara, mentions of Aang/Katara  
><strong>Summary<strong>: It should be beautiful, but her definition of beauty has changed.  
><strong>AN**: Song is "The Royal We" by the Silversun Pickups. I've been kind of in a slump lately, so I'm apologizing for the heavy, heavy angst here.

* * *

><p>it was i -<br>feel the sparks of the friendly fire, misery inspires

She looks away, always away. Eye contact isn't something that happens to them anymore, even fleeting, even for a moment. The yellow in her clothes makes her look exotic and untouchable and so many thousands of miles away from him and he won't look at her eyes because they're the only jarring part; her dark skin melts into the yellow dress, her brown hair cascades over it _just so_, but her blue eyes don't _fit._

He tells himself, and sometimes he believes it, that her blue eyes would look much better in red clothing.

But red doesn't happen to her anymore, either.

She tells herself, and sometimes she believes it, that she's always loved the color yellow.

your throat has been cut several times before  
>never noticed the size of the flow, it can't be ignored<p>

Home is like a dream, part nightmare and part memory and part memories of nightmares and part memories of dreams. It's colder than she remembers, and darker, and emptier, and it's not _home_ anymore. It's the hut she grew up in, it's the village she knows, but it's missing something vital, whatever part of it that was most important. She thinks it might be herself; she is here and she is not here at the same time.

Her body is in the Southern Water Tribe, her mind is in the Southern Air Temple, and her heart -

(_There are still flowers tonight_.)

She blinks it out of her memory.

There are children here, most imported from the Northern Water Tribe, and they look so at home among the snow, so like herself five, ten years ago, although the older ones sniff in disdain at the scant town. _It's nothing like home_, they say.

_Yeah_, she thinks. _It really isn't._

She stands in the swirling snow, and she feels like there should be a blizzard, some sort of raging, angry, violent weather, something so incredible that it can reach through her ever-thickening shell and drag her back like a slap to the face or a bolt of lightning to the -

Her eyes open and she gasps hard in the cold air and tears spring to her eyes; her heart is thudding in her chest, her head is pounding with the beat, her mind is buried somewhere deep within her. The cold should feel familiar, should be welcoming, should remind her of better days. All it feels, though, is like early spring. She doesn't know why she thought of lightning all of a sudden, she _doesn't_ - it's not even a storm, just a light snowfall, kicked up by the light winds.

It should be beautiful, but her defintion of beauty has changed.

(_They're called _sakura._ What's left of them, that is.)_

She closes her eyes again, and tells herself that the way the weak sun glints off the snowdrifts is beautiful. That the glittering snowflakes are lovely. That the ice and snow sculptures the children are making are gorgeous.

The burnt-black trunks of trees still half-in-bloom flash into her mind.

She dreams in black and pink and red, and does not tell Aang about her nightmares.

to feel safe again look over your shoulder  
>carefully, look over your shoulder<p>

She's a good liar; he doesn't think anyone else can tell. Maybe Aang could, maybe if he was paying close enough attention, but Aang is too busy paying attention to their relationship to pay attention to _her._ He sees what he wants to see in Katara, and maybe most of it's true, but Aang's view of her doesn't take in the shadows or the scars or the darkness or the woman who would bend the blood out of a man's veins for empty vengeance. What he sees is true, but somehow he still doesn't see the truth.

On the inverse, that's _all_ he sees. It shouldn't be so beautiful.

Darkness fascinates him, much as it concerns him. He knows that madness is in his blood, and part of him wonders if there's some way she could bend that blood out of him, pull at his veins and take out the part of him that's tied to Azula, to Ozai, and leave behind just what's his and Mother's, take away the parts of him that drag him under, the parts of him that dragged Azula under. He's not so naive or so stupid as to think she really can, but in the moments between his dreams and his nightmares and his insomnia and the wound-up-tight spring in the back of his mind - he wishes it was that simple.

He dreams in red and blue and yellow. He dreams in bad blood, he dreams in madness, he dreams in fear. And he knows that he isn't the only one.

Madness may not blacken her family tree, but she's tasted its water before, just as he has, and she knows as well as he does that - bitter as it tastes, revolting as it feels - it has a siren's song and an allure and a tantalizing sickly-sweet aftertaste that can't always be fought. _Together_, he thinks, _together we could fight it, we could hold it at bay, we could protect each other, we could_ -

But she is wearing yellow, and does not wear red anymore.

She is not his to protect, nor his to admire, nor his to understand. He just wishes that someone else could see the lies hiding under her skin.

"Yellow isn't really your color," he says sardonically, when everyone has wandered off to beds or stables or their own campfires. She's watching the snow with a determinedly blank face.

"Red never looked any better," she replies, and he flinches involuntarily.

"What is it you aren't saying?" he asks instead. "What's bothering you?"

She looks at him, so he looks away. He can talk in red and yellow, but he can't talk in _blue._ "You aren't supposed to notice," she whispers. "No one else noticed. You can't." _Our happy ending_, he thinks, glancing at her as she turns away. This is our happy ending. This is the life we've chosen for ourselves.

(_But they're still alive tonight._)

He can't push the memory away. "You could have walked away," he says, and can't keep the earnestness out of his voice. "You didn't have to, you weren't obligated to - "

"No," she answers curtly. "I _wasn't_ obligated. I _chose._ I chose Aang. I chose this," she adds quietly, so low he almost can't hear it over the breeze and the feather-soft snowfall. There's white snow in her hair and melting into her yellow dress and he tells himself that he's glad it isn't red; if it was red, the snowmelt would make her look like she was wearing blood. If it was red, it would be one of his worst, most tenacious nightmares coming to life in front of him.

But if it was red, his heart says, if it was red it would mean that she had chosen _him._

He wants to get angry, he wants to rage, to scream, to yell at her, to _hate _her. He wants to say things like _why wasn't I good enough for you? What does he have that I don't? Why is he always the lucky one? Why am I always the loser?_ But she doesn't deserve his hatred - she never has - and when he looks at her, he swears he can still smell cherry blossoms and ash.

"The _sakura_ trees haven't grown back yet," he says, and she flinches away.

"I guess they can't grow on burnt ground."

_We could make them grow again,_ he thinks. _Together, we could -_

But they are who they have chosen to be, they live the lives they've chosen to live. This is a happy ending, if left unexamined. The weak spring sun has set for a few hours, and darkness falls wearily to the snowdrifts.

"Nothing grows on ice, either," he replies, and she looks halfway towards him, but at the floor. He takes his cue to leave, but as he's almost out the door, he could swear that she says so softly -

"Just because the trees are dead doesn't mean they weren't beautiful."

He pretends not to hear her.

you said you believe it but believing won't fly  
>right before you hit your prime<p>

(They stand on the edge of the palace, looking out through the courtyard, slashed and torn and painted with charcoal and ice. The red haze is fading; the comet is passing, and for the moment, they are alone.

_The flowers are pretty,_ she says, voice wavering, an attempt at inane conversation, an attempt at normality after the storm.

_They're called _sakura_, _he replies, leaning heavily on the windowframe._ What's left of them, anyway_, he adds bitterly. The uppermost flowers are still in bloom, but the trunks and lower branches are black with fire, and already crumbling. They'll be gone by morning.

_Just because they're a little burnt doesn't make them ugly_, she says slowly.

_They'll be dead by morning,_ he mutters.

_But they're still alive tonight_, she says. _There's still some flowers tonight. _He looks at her and she doesn't move to look back and she doesn't breathe. Her voice is half-caught in her throat and her tongue is heavy like lead and she's somewhere between desperate exhaustion and terrified insomnia and she wants to run and she wants to stay but most of all she wants this moment to last.

_What do you think will happen tomorrow?_ he asks, voice just too soft to be entirely innocent.

_They'll come back_, she replies, matching his tone and injecting it with hope rather than fear. _They'll all come back, and we'll organize your coronation and - and they'll come back. _They'll find us here, she doesn't say, and we'll fall away from each other and go on to another future. Without the war, she has no reason to be here, and every reason to be elsewhere. She's too tired to feel bad for her remorse, too tired to worry anymore, too tired to pity Azula, too tired to turn away from him, too tired to stop her hands from touching the bandages on his chest, the scar on his face.

_They'll be back in the morning_, he murmurs, leaning in to her touch.

_But at least we have tonight._)

_that's where we fell in love but not the first time._

Just because it's dead doesn't mean it wasn't beautiful.

In her dreams, she is wearing red.


End file.
